Lord Whitty
Main Page: Lord Whitty (Labour - Life peer)UN Sustainable Development Goal 3
Lord Whitty Excerpts
Lord Whitty
That this House takes note of the United Kingdom’s progress towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 and, in particular, target 3.6 of halving global road deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2020.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Robertson, and at his request, I shall move this Motion. For understandable reasons, in the present circumstances my noble friend Lord Robertson has decided not to travel down from Scotland, and I have therefore been asked to introduce this debate. My noble friend apologises to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, in the chair, that he did not receive that information.
My noble friend Lord Robertson is the chair of the FIA Foundation. It is the second-largest global charitable funder for road safety in the world, following Bloomberg Philanthropies. He would obviously have intended to focus on the global situation and the SDG target, and most of what I say at the beginning of my remarks will be focused on that.
Clearly coronavirus is foremost in everybody’s minds at the moment, and it may seem a bit odd that we are devoting parliamentary time now to road safety, but the two are, to a degree, connected. Think about how many intensive care wards, hospital beds and ambulances will be needed to cope with coronavirus and then think about how we are squandering vital health resources around the world on entirely preventable road traffic accidents. There are five deaths every day in the UK and more than 60 serious injuries. Globally, more than 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, and at least 10 million people are seriously injured. Some 250,000 children and teenagers will be killed by adults driving vehicles this year. That is the world’s number one cause of death among young people. It is therefore important that there is a sustainable development goal target dedicated to reducing traffic deaths and injuries.
There was a meeting in Stockholm last month involving Ministers and officials from 140 countries to approve the Stockholm declaration, an action plan for halving traffic deaths worldwide by 2030. I intended to go, but I was unable to do so in the end. I thank the Minister—or the Minister’s colleague—for attending that conference.
Many of the measures in the action plan are familiar. They are familiar in this country and around the world, but the problem is that, although we have managed to reduce road accidents in this country over the past 50 years from around 8,000 to below 1,800 by 2010, things that we have done here have not been adopted worldwide, such as seat belts, safety vehicles, road design, improved braking systems and, above all, speed management. In low and middle-income countries, which have the biggest problems here—90% of casualties occur in those countries—those relatively low-hanging fruits remain to be plucked. Too few people in those countries are wearing safety helmets on motorbikes, too many new high-speed roads are being built without safety precautions, sidewalks or protection for pedestrians, and too many world auto makers are still willing to produce and sell in those countries new vehicles without crumple zones or even basic safety technology.
This is beginning to change, and the UK has been involved in trying to change it. The FIA Foundation has also helped spread the message around the world. UK-based charities have led much of the specialist action on traffic safety. The international road assessment programme is now working with the World Bank and highways authorities in more than 100 countries. Another UK charity, the Global New Car Assessment Programme, is crash-testing popular family cars in Latin America, India and South Africa and publishing the results so that it identifies and shames poor-performing car makers. It praises well-designed vehicles and by doing so boosts consumers’ demand for safety in their cars.
Our expertise is being deployed to help meet that world aim. There was a time when the Department for International Development did not include much about road safety in its grant aid programme, but it is now providing much-needed support to the World Bank’s global road safety facilities and, together with the Department of Health and Social Care, is funding a world-leading road safety research programme. The Department for Transport was also involved in important international conferences last year.
Yet, despite these welcome interventions here in the UK, we should do much more. On funding, the UK should join and support the UN Road Safety Fund, which urgently needs new donors and technical assistance. Currently, bilateral donors include France, Russia and the European Commission. We should join them. There are plenty of schemes to be met: the last call for proposals outstripped the actual money available fifteenfold. We also need to build safety and effectiveness into western and multilateral donors, including DfID, which historically has actually helped to fund unsafe roads without a serious safety element being incorporated.
The recent inclusion of road safety in the World Bank programme is an important development. We need stronger global health governance and co-operation to ensure that road safety is treated as a serious cause of ill health, particularly among young people around the world. We need to approach road travel as a safe system, so that roads, drivers, enforcement and protection of non-vehicle road users are part of a total system. Because mistakes are inevitable, we also need to prevent collisions causing harm and to empower recovery, rescue and hospitalisation to be more effective.
These issues apply around the world. The countries that are most subject to large-scale road safety problems are the poorer and the younger countries of the world. But we should not ignore the fact that we have problems in this country. In the last 10 years, the very welcome reductions of the preceding 20 years have largely stalled for deaths and, to some extent, serious injuries. I hesitate to advance this theory, but for the preceding 20 years, up until 2010, a clear and overarching road safety strategy was adopted by successive Governments. In 1990, the then Road Safety Minister, Peter Bottomley, launched a 10-year programme and, since 2000, we have seen a major reduction in casualties. I hesitate to mention the Road Safety Minister in 2000, but we too launched a 10-year programme at that point, which saw a very significant reduction until 2010.
Much more was still to be done, and the absence of an overarching strategy since 2010 has, whether causally related or not, coincided with the fact that the reduction of casualties here has stalled. There has been some serious progress even so. For example, Highways England’s decision to star rate the inbuilt infrastructure safety of all of its roads is a very important development. Indeed, it is another example of a British institution taking on a three-star rating so that 100 countries in the world have seen their networks based on that new star rating. That was adopted by iRAP with the support of the FIA Foundation, and my organisation, the Road Safety Foundation, continues to deliver many of its benefits. Incidentally, each star gained represents a halving of the rate of death and serious injury.
About 60% of the deaths in Britain are concentrated on targetable motorways and A roads. The DfT trialled a new approach on the 50 most recent local authority roads, as measured by the Road Safety Foundation. The results proved that, within nine months, it was possible to bring forward 50 schemes on the worst roads and train 30 local authorities—through the Road Safety Foundation—in a new, systematic approach to measuring and reducing risk on those roads. A £100 million portfolio of investment was given by the Government, and the return on that was a benefit-cost ratio of 4.4. It was a good initiative by this Government, but that funding is now uncertain. It needs to be continued and new schemes need to be applied to the remaining strategic unsafe roads.
Many other things need to be done. There are issues relating to safety in vehicles. Cars are now designed to make collisions at 40 miles an hour survivable for occupants. Roads are designed, or speeds are reduced, to make head-on or side-on crashes above 40 miles an hour impossible. A pedestrian’s likelihood of dying increases exponentially above 20 miles an hour, so the new emphasis on traffic speeds, particularly in our urban areas, to below 20 miles an hour, is very important. It is not rocket science. This is, perhaps, an epidemic for which we do have the vaccines, which are—given the funding and the priority—relatively easy to introduce.
Does the Minister agree that it is time for the Department for Transport to revisit the issue of a longer-term strategic plan? I know that in 2018, the DfT commissioned a study to look at road safety management capability in this country and produced a detailed report. It called, among other things, for a clearer strategy and clearer cohesion across departments for delivering road safety targets. Can the Minister tell us what has happened to that report and whether we can anticipate another, more coherent road safety strategy when the present crisis and focus of government changes?
Many other new things are happening. We are on the verge of semi-autonomous and autonomous cars. As the owner of a relatively new car, I find it quite difficult to manage the head-up display and the electronic distraction right in front of you. The Institute for Advanced Management sent me a note saying that part of its research into in-car entertainment showed a distraction of 16 seconds, which at 70 miles an hour is a five or six-car distance distraction for the driver. That brings its own problems. So, technology that improves driving the car and the comfort of the passengers can be distracting and therefore dangerous to everybody, including the passengers. I specifically ask the Minister whether he has any comments on that research. The way in which car design and differentiation between models is going, what is on your dashboard is used as a selling point.
With those remarks, and particularly the focus that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, would want to see on the international situation and Britain’s role in that, I beg to move.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that summing up and for his mastery of the brief at short notice. He has covered a lot of the points.
I referred in my opening remarks to my chairmanship of the Road Safety Foundation, but I should also have referred to my chairmanship of EEAST, a charity that deals with projects in central Asia and eastern Europe. The remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, about her experience in Iraq, and indeed my noble friend Lord Rosser’s reference to Saigon, illustrated that, in both rural and urban areas, the impact of motor traffic, often for the first time, on whole communities means that you have to take the whole community to you. The link I would make with the plea relating to the strategic goals is that until relatively recently neither DfID nor, even more so, the multilaterals had included road safety in their major development projects. That has changed and they have specific funds for it. DfID has been a leader in that, which I applaud, but it is also true that very substantial aid from this country, the European Union, the World Bank and other multilateral organisations goes to promoting the development of roads and rail infra- structure in those countries. It is important that safety is not an add-on, but is built in.
Part of building it in is taking the community with you. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, that the appreciation of British engagement in these matters is an important aspect of soft power and one that undoubtedly has a real benefit to the lives of those communities and the lives saved by such interventions.
I am also happy to thank the Minister for his references to the 10-year period of action, which is close to my 10-year strategic plan. I hope he takes on board some of the suggestions in relation to eyesight that the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, and the noble Lord, Lord Low, made. I had one disappointment in the Minister’s view in relation to that. Yes, there are technical difficulties in relation to eyesight and enforcement of whether or not you wear your glasses, but they are not insuperable. I believe this is an important part of saving lives and avoiding incidents on the roads domestically in the UK, and one on which other countries around the world would welcome British input. He should take seriously the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Low, of a dialogue with the Association of Optometrists. It is very important that this dimension is taken into account.
The general support for the work that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, was intending to bring to our attention is welcome. I hope we see a follow-through in the coming years. I beg to move.